For a second her face brightened. "No--but--I shall be quite strong in another fortnight--and then--I could go out to you wherever you were, and we could come back together, couldn't we?" There was no answer. "You might go--to please me." He laughed shortly. "I might go to please myself. But what's the good of talking about it when you know I can't." "Well, if you'd rather wait, there's the Riviera"--he colored violently--"would that do for you?" "Yes; I think it _would_ 'do' for me--just about." "Well--anywhere then. If I'm well enough to go to the Riviera, I'm--" "You're not well enough to go to the Riviera." "What makes you think that?" she asked gravely. He looked away and muttered something about "Thompson," and "the journey." Again that look of agonized comprehension! She said nothing. She knew that he had lied. Ah, to what pitiful shifts she had driven him! He hurried off to his appointment, and she lay on her couch by the window with clenched hands and closed eyelids. She had no sensations to speak of; but thought came to her--confused, overwhelming thought--an agony of ideas. She loved him. Ah, the shame of it! And that hidden hope of hers became a terror. Mrs. Nevill Tyson's soul was struggling with its immortality. The hot flare of summer was in the streets and in the room; the old life was surging everywhere around her; above the brutal roar and gust of it, blown from airy squares, flung back from throbbing thoroughfares, she caught responsive voices, rhythmic, inarticulate murmurs, ripples of the resonant joy of the world. Down there, in their dim greenery, the very plane-trees were whispering together under the shadow of the great flats. What were these things to Mrs. Nevill Tyson? She had entered the New Life, as you enter heaven, alone. CHAPTER XVIII A MIRACLE In the afternoon of the following day Tyson was sitting with Molly in the dining-room when he was told that Captain Stanistreet had called and had asked to see him. "Was he--?" Yes, the Captain was in the drawing-room. Tyson was a little surprised at the announcement; for though the shock of the fire had somewhat obscured his recollection of the events that preceded it, Molly had unfortunately recalled them to his memory. But he had clean forgotten some of the details. Consequently he was more than a little surprised when Stanistreet, without any greeting or formality whatsoever, took two letters from his pocket and flung one of them on the window-seat. "That's your letter," he said. "And here's the answer." He laid Molly's little note down beside it. Tyson stared at the letters rather stupidly. That correspondence was one of the details he had forgotten. He also stared at Stanistreet, who looked horribly ill. Then he took up Molly's note and examined it without reading a word. It was crumpled, dirty, almost illegible, as if Louis had thrust it violently into his pocket, and carried it about with him for weeks.